India, Aug. 5 -- Sometimes, an ordinary sight is profoundly telling. This overcast noon, a food vendor is dragging his pushcart along a central Delhi avenue.

The words painted on the cart-A-One Veg Biryani-inadvertently summon attention to two contemporary trends. The first is about the city's fetish for a particular lingual expression. The other is the increasing spread of a dish variety that, some argue, violates the essential tenets of that dish's mother recipe.

Let's first discuss the matter of A-One.

The Oxford dictionary explains it as a colloquial for describing something as "excellent," or "first rate."

Whilst biryani, the dictionary explains, is "an originally Indian dish made with highly seasoned rice, and meat or fish, etc....